How To Recover From a Google Penalty?

What is Google Penalty?

Search engine traffic is essential for many online businesses. However, it is not easy to gain high rankings in Google. So many marketers and SEO specialists are approaching the link-building practice to the maximum which has created many websites penalised for going against the Google’s rule.

This is why Google introduced Penalty to stop spammers from playing with their algorithm.

Google penalty refers to a harmful impact on a website’s search engine ranking which is based on updates to algorithms as well as manual evaluation of Google search engine.

During 2010, Google laid a pipe bomb on every web spammers who tried to game Google to get their website ranked high in SERPs. It threw two of its top warriors – Panda and Penguin.

Panda was targeted to demolish poor and duplicate content. Whereas, Penguin was more into spammy link building techniques which killed many spam building tools.

If your website is penalised by Google, your website will lose visibility in Google which turns bad for your business. Luckily there are some procedures which will help you to recover from a Google Penalty.

How to recover from a Google penalty?

Before moving to recovering from Google Penalty, it’s essential to understand the causes behind it. You must know if your site has been hit by Panda or Penguin. Usually, Panda is an easy getaway penalty. But penguin can give you the tough time. However, after a recent penguin update, the also has changed to real time making it much quicker and easier to recover from Penalty.

Use Copyscape

Google wants originality in the content and some Google penalties are due to duplicate or copied content. Google takes duplicate content as a serious issue and is strongly penalised as intentional plagiarism. If you think you may be dealing with the content-based penalty, Copyscape can help you to find out whether any of your content exists anywhere online or not. You can use this tool as it is cheap and simple with less convenient as each URL has to be entered one by one. If you are sure that it’s Panda that has affected your website, Copyscape can help you scrape through some duplicate content. Remove them and you are ready to go.

Monitor Backlinks

Monitor Backlinks is an effective tool that is used to find bad backlinks.As soon as you import your links from Google Webmaster tool into Monitor Backlinks you can check for do follow backlinks. Then you can use filters to change to external and then verify backlinks manually. You can always check if someone has done negative SEO to your site. This handy little tool helps you track where your website stands and what happened that made it drop off the search results.

Examine quality of your links

Having many unnatural links pointing back to your site can be the main reason you are penalised by Google but that does not mean your links are bad. Did you hire any SEO in the past? SEOs are notorious and often may lead your site into jeopardy. If they have sent 1000’s of low-quality links to your website. Then, your website needs to get hit. So, first, you need to find out which links are appearing from spam. There are different types of links which you need to analyse and they are Links from non-indexed sites, links from blog network, links from unreliable and much more.

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Record your work

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To record your work you can create Google Docs Spreadsheet where you can track your each work and see where you are in the link removal process. This will be very beneficial when you present a review request to Google and they will be able to see accurately what you have done to solve the problem with your sites.

Use Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster tool is a most important source for all the sites. It is only the actual way to know how Google views your site. Google Webmaster lets you know directly regarding any manual penalties Google has forced. When you see that a manual action has been taken against your site you will know that you need to work and get out of duplicate content, spammed backlinks or resolve other issues. If you have got a manual penalty, you will find a message in Webmaster Tools regarding it. So, be sure to check it.

Google penalty is a serious issue as it harms the image of your business. Following these above-listed procedures, you can recover your site from Google penalty and achieve improved search engine ranks. If you need a professional SEO service that can do the footwork for you, feel free to contact us.